“A parlor game they used to play back in some old-time European courts he frequented. Five people sit in a dark room with a single candle in the middle. One is the Linchpin, the orchestrator; he plays the other four off each other using various forms of trickery and manipulation. But no one knows who the Linchpin is, and in the course of finding out, the group forges alliances, betrayals, etcetera. Until there are only two players left.”
“You and Sarco.” My voice is cold.
“I didn’t . . . I didn’t know it was happening! I just . . . I thought . . .”
“Who were the others?”
“Well, you, of course. Andre. Samuel Bennacourt—the one who called himself Gregorio.”
The one who tried to feed my children to the roach horde before Reza and Carlos killed him.
“What was the play?”
“You.”
“Explain.”
“You started getting threatening letters. At the office you temped at first. Graphic, horrible shit . . . rape, dismemberment, whole family killed. All that.”
I shudder. At least one part of that came true, though Flores doesn’t know I know that.
“Of course, everyone was freaked out—me most of all. I tried to keep you from going in, followed you around everywhere. It drove a wedge between us. I was . . . overprotective.”
No shit.
He shrugs, almost sheepishly. It’s the first unscripted thing he’s done since we’ve met. “I was convinced Andre was behind the whole thing. I never liked him, and it fit nicely into the twisted image I had of him inserting himself into our marriage. You two were . . . close. Sarco was a genius for letting other people’s fantasies convince them of whatever he wanted them to believe. Andre thought it was Bennacourt, a local drifter. I convinced you, somewhat, that Andre was a threat—he’d started acting erratic at the end too. Sarco kept ratcheting up the terror—a shattered window late at night, more notes, a stray dog killed on our doorstep—until one night he arranged it so we’d all end up at Grand Army Plaza along with a few other folks that had gotten involved. Tensions were already so high, it quickly erupted into violence. Andre cut down Bennacourt, who was reaching for you, both thinking they were protecting you. You killed Andre, thinking he meant to kill you.”
“And you killed me?”
He shakes his head. “I could never, Ai . . . Sasha. Never. I was meant to, though. Sarco had poisoned my thoughts against you, made me believe that you’d been cheating with Andre. He knew I was jealous.”
“I hadn’t though, had I?”
“No, never. Which made it all the worse. But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I ran, terrified, when the blood started flowing. I . . . I did, I ran. I had figured out there was more at play once Andre showed up in a fury.”
“Who, then?”
“Sarco. You were holding Andre’s body in your arms, sobbing. He cut your throat. He told me later . . . when everything had come to light.”
I rub my throat, shoving away all the images that try to rise in my mind.
Not now.
Not here.
“And then there were two,” I say. “You and Sarco.”
“I didn’t know he was behind it all then.” His voice pleading now, a guttural whine. “I didn’t know. And even when I figured out it was him, I didn’t realize to what extent. Took a few weeks to unravel the whole thing, and by then—”
“You’d already helped him kill us.”
“I never killed anyone!” A shriek. The stone synagogue looms above us now. It’s abandoned, pillars desecrated with posters and graffiti, windows shattered and shuttered.
“Not with your hands, no.”
“When I found out, I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t bear it. I’d put most of it together, and then one night outside the safe house, I confronted him and he told me the rest. How he’d studied us, figured out all of our fears and eccentricities, then turned us on each other like pieces on a game board. He’d made it seem like we were helping you, nursing you all back to life. Like everything would be alright.”
“You were so mad at Sarco you offed yourself in the park.”
“I was ashamed! I’d let it all play out. I . . . I couldn’t live with that. You were the only woman I’d ever loved.”
I can’t stop the shudder that runs through me when he says it.
“And I thought maybe . . . maybe I could make it up somehow, if not in life, then in death. You were . . . you are the light that keeps me going, always. And I’d learned from Sarco, learned mysteries about the line between life and death. I knew how to access power in that realm, what to do with it. And I was half-crazed with guilt and grief; I figured I could strike back somehow, get on the inside.”
The implication of what he said creeps slowly up my spine. “You were already inside. You were working with Sarco.”
“Not inside Sarco’s operation, inside the Council.”
There it is. “The Council was—”
“The Council was allied with Sarco from the beginning. They funded his work, sent him soulcatcher support teams, had his back in every way imaginable.”
I stare at him, my face stricken. The Council . . .
“Right up until he got what he wanted—a team of inbetweeners to play with at his will. That’s what they wanted too; that was why they were helping him, because he promised he could deliver. They needed someone, or someones preferably, to handle that murky borderline, do the shit they couldn’t.
“But then Sarco went rogue. He lost track of Andre that night when a Soulcatcher Prime came upon him as Sarco’s people were removing the rest. Or perhaps he left him there on purpose, a token to placate the Council. Anyway, three didn’t survive. Sarco took the ones he had and started plotting against the Council.”
“Along with my brother, Trevor.”
“And then the—”
“Council sent Carlos to destroy him. And you?”
“And I—”
“You laid low like you’d done while we were being slaughtered. What? Biding your time? Letting everyone else do the dirty work?” My voice rises above the quiet murmur I’d kept it at. People begin to stare.
“Biding my time, yes. Not everything gets done by being hotheaded and irrational. Sometimes strategy is involved.”
This useless piece of shit.
I move us down a side street—less pestering attention, but still I’m outnumbered and outgunned as soon as I present a threat. This area has its own security force, and when the cops do come, they’ll shoot a black woman with a sword on sight. I’m sure Flores took all this into consideration when he led me north.
“What do you mean?” I demand.
“I’ve worked my way through the ranks, from soulcatcher to ’Catcher Prime to minister. I thought I’d be one of the Seven at this point, but that didn’t quite work out how I planned.”
“To what end?”
“We change the Council from the inside, Sasha. They will never see it coming. I’ve gained their trust, and I know how to maneuver the politics of it. And they need me, at this point, what with the war coming. They—”
I hold up my hand. He shuts up.
“We?”
“Yes, Sasha. Sasha. You and me. There is so much power between us—you don’t feel it?” He drops to one knee and still is almost as tall as me. “I know we’ve come through a bloody corridor to be together again, but we can let that blood be a cleansing, a fortification for the future we have together. I know you don’t trust me now, but you did once, and I believe you will again. I believe we will sit side by side and bring peace and balance to the realms of the living and dead. This is our destiny, Sasha, you and I. And all this, all that I’ve done, I did it for you. I did it for lo—”
I’ve heard enough. My hand flies back, grips the handle of my blade over my shoulder. I’m fast, but Flores is
no slouch. He throws himself to the side as my blade drops. The cut glances off his shoulder guard, shredding a slice off that cloak.
“Aisha, no!” He rolls backward, scrambling for his broadsword.
“My name”—I slash again, up, then down and across, catch him twice but never deep—“is Sasha.”
He’s fast. My next cut crashes against his sword.
“Hey!” someone yells nearby. “What’s going on over there?”
Time is running out.
“You don’t understand!” Flores pleads.
I waste no more words. My blade rains down in relentless strikes. He blocks and blocks, refuses to cut back. I can’t get inside his defenses, though, not for more than a glancing blow.
Car tires screech at the end of the block. Footsteps run toward us from Bedford. I must look insane. Sweat pours down my face. “You there! Woman! Hello?”
This has to end, but there’s no endgame, and I’m running out of energy already.
From a few blocks away, a siren sounds.
“Hello? Ma’am?”
Figures close in around us. I put my back into the next hit, crash this blade down hard enough on his to throw him off-balance. And still his defense holds.
“Hold it right there!” someone yells. No guns have clicked yet, but still . . . The siren gets louder.
“You disgust me,” I whisper. Then I spit into his empty face, and then I’m gone, down the backstreets of South Williamsburg and out by the open throughway near the river.
“You okay?” Carlos says over the phone as I slide into the back of a black livery cab.
“Yeah,” I manage between pants, “but you gotta reach out to Cyrus, tell him to go on high alert. Council’s about to come out swinging.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Caitlin
The Tammany sits a half block from Luther’s, but it’s a whole other world. Luther’s bursts with thundering pop and flashing lights, a half thousand customers blaring their mediocre days into each other’s ears and squiggling across the dance floor like so many worms abandoned after the rain. The Tam is a back-roads shotgun shack in comparison. I mean, we’re in Midtown Manhattan, so it’s not like it’s actually a dive—rather, a carefully constructed rendition of one. It does the trick, though. Folks only come here to sulk and soak in their gin and tonics, texting exes or drawing elaborate suicide plans on napkins while a guy with a receding mullet sings Hootie & the Blowfish knockoffs over the PA.
I come to get work done, because it’s easier to concentrate here than in an office full of bleating crisis donkeys. And here no one cares when I have unusual visitors. Every once in a while, a ghost shows up. The dead like dives, even the fake-downtrodden ones like this, because hey, these days you gotta take what you can get, am I right? But that’s fine. Whenever one tries to set up shop in a dark corner with all those shimmery tendrils and moans, I just walk up to it real slow and put my face in its face and growl. They’re so startled I can not only see them but also don’t give a half a fuck about them that they usually beat it right then and there, and then it’s just me again.
Well, me and the half dozen fuckups that find solace in this hole. And the bartender. His name is Ennis, but he’s alright. And that body . . . Ennis looks like he could bench-press me and not break a sweat.
Probably gay, though. Never met a straight guy named Ennis.
Anyway, tonight I’m nursing my second Guinness and breezing through these transfer documents, feeling pretty good, when Bellamy starts yelling at Ennis to turn the TV up. Bellamy is a self-absorbed human catastrophe that loves to feel important, so I don’t pay much mind. Scribble the last signature on the doc I’m on and then glance up and turns out a plane went down in some forgettable Asian country that no one cares about. I’m about to look away when they cut to a shot of the wreckage—charred, smoldering heaps of metal, and then I’m back in front of my childhood home that night almost a year ago, and all that’s left are charred, smoldering heaps, and one last fire engine is still there, painting the whole block with its pulsing glare.
Carlos Delacruz set that fire, along with that bull-dyke bitch Reza he started running with.
The Blattodeons had collected my parents’ corpses and gave them a proper burial in the underground passageways. And the truth is, I’d never been close to either of them. From a very young age, I knew I was different and bound for a different life. Richard and Evelyn Fern were a means to an end. They knew it and I knew it. And parents are parents, even if only genetically, and then there I am again, the air cluttered with smoke and ash and the only home I’ve ever known just a blackened pile of embers and melted plastic and charred metal.
“Caitlin?” The man standing over my table is backlit, and I’m still caught up in that smoky Queens night. Sloppy. I stand too quickly, upset some foamy Guinness onto my paperwork, curse, and squint through the lights at my visitor, who’s now trying to mop up the foam with my napkins.
“Detective,” I say. “Don’t trouble yourself, please.”
“No, it’s fine—I didn’t mean to startle you.” We’re both fumbling with napkins and papers now, and finally I just lift the whole stack and put them on the table next to me. Paramus Jim is too far gone to notice.
“You didn’t, really. Sit.”
Detective Randall Corvin of the NYPD Special Victims Unit is all sharp angles and brisk, indelicate movements. He takes off his jacket and sits, placing two pointy elbows on the table and leaning in. His weaselly little face is pinched into a sour pout, but then a grin appears, which is even more alarming. “Caitlin.”
“Detective.”
“Please, Caitlin, I’m off duty. Call me Randy. Really.”
I’ll never understand why someone who could be called detective would voluntarily insist on being called Randy but there it is. “Randy.” I make myself smile. “Do you have it?”
“Caitlin, this can’t keep happening. It’s very, very difficult to pull an unauthorized records search like this.”
“I know, Randy, believe me, I do. My job requires constant wrangling with arbitrary systems that do nothing more than get in the way of those of us protecting society’s least vulnerable members. But we do what we have to, right? And sometimes that means taking risks. I promise I only ask because there are lives at stake. Young lives.”
Detective Randy flinches. “I don’t like it. Any of it. Technically, if you’re concerned about a crime being committed, you should—”
“Call nine-one-one and let the cops handle it—I know, Randy, but you know as well I do, better probably, how many issues there are with that. Don’t play naive with me. This has to get done, and it has to get done fast, and it has to get done right. We need to make sure those children are in the safe home the state has entrusted us to put them in, and if they’re not, it’s my job to find out. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to pass that responsibility to an agency that has all the delicacy and investigative skills of an inbred llama.”
This is called “bringing it home.” Randy and I have talked at length about his own department’s failings. He is chronically despondent and in over his head. He’ll probably be dead in a year, if not from some pedophile’s knife, then the stress will take him out. Either way, he’s useful to me now, insofar as I can use his own hatred of the department against him.
“I don’t like it,” Randy says again, as if him not liking something is a novelty. He puts his briefcase on the table, digs out a file. Doesn’t give it to me. “If anything goes wrong, you’re to call nine-one-one. If you have any concerns, doubts, questions, whatever, you’re to call me.”
“Understood.”
He squints, his already-tight face squinching into a crumpled sheet of paper. “Okay.” He passes the file.
“Thank you, Detective.”
“Randy.”
“Thank you, Detective Randy.” I smile and he s
ort of flinches, and then some small talk happens, dwindles, and then he’s gone and I’m scanning this list of calls, but really I’m there on that night with the dying embers of my childhood home.
“Everything is gonna be alright,” the mullet guy howls over and over. I want to punch him in the fucking face.
Ten minutes later, the murmuring bar gets quiet. Everyone has turned to stare at two tall men walking toward me. I get it: to the normal human eye, the Blattodeons just look off somehow. It’s an offness you can’t name or place; the brain recoils at their slightly arrhythmic gait, their unblinking eyes and fixed pupils. Makes sense. They are, after all, deteriorating human carcasses sheathed in a single layer of large, pink cockroaches, all nestled in close together to form a skin-like cover. But they’re designed to blend in, and even if they don’t fully do that, it’s generally enough not to get the cops called or too many eyebrows raised.
And behold: by the time the two Blattodeons reach my table, everyone’s turned back to the bar, their cell phones, their tired, shiftless lives.
“Brazen!” the mullet sing-yells. “Your love was brazen when it rained down on me . . . a-down down down on me-ee-e.”
“Sit,” I say, and they do, in that awkward, Blattodeon way. The file lies open in front of them. “The highlighted lines, you see?”
Nods.
“She will be there. It’s far away, so you must leave immediately. Take six more of your own. Scope the place out well before you attack. Don’t underestimate the target. She is ruthless and almost unkillable. You must not fail me. There will probably be others with her. Spare none.”
More nods. A roach detaches itself from one of their faces, adjusts itself, snuggles back in with the others.
“If the babies are there, bring them to me.”
Both widen their dead eyes. The Delacruz twins had been slated to host the Blattodeon Master Hive until Reza and Carlos got in the damn way. What was once a divine trinity with empires of roaches to command was shattered in one night. Now it’s down to a single spiritual legacy that lives on in me alone. And I barely know what to do with it, to be honest, except what I’ve always done, what I did when Jeremy was the High Priest: clean up the messes everyone else has left behind.
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